In today's networking environment, electronic mail or e-mail is widely used by almost anyone having a computer device. Most of mail systems are based on Internet standards, the main standards being the Post Office Protocol (POP as defined in the Request For Comment RFC1939) for receiving e-mail and the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP as defined in the RFC2821) for sending e-mail.
On the basis of the SMTP model, a user who generates a mail composes the text of the message and provides additional information in specific fields of the header of the message, such as the destinations) (namely the To, Cc, Bcc fields) or the subject-matter (namely the Subject field).
Once a mail is sent or received by a user, this latter may wish to store it in order to be able to retrieve it easily later on. The electronic mail systems generally used the so-called mail folders to record the mails. Such mail folders are very convenient for organizing and structuring all the mails that user may either have received or sent. Furthermore structured and nested mail folders allow to quickly access mails, for instance based on the topic they relate to.
A first typical scenario happens when a mail is sent by a user. After completion of the mail edition, the user can select a “Send and File” function in order to send the mail to the specified destination(s) and to file (or record) it within a mail folder. For this purpose, the user have to select the folder within which he/she wants to file the mail.
A second typical scenario happens when a mail is received by a user. The received mail is normally found in an “in-basket” generic folder. When the user has read the mail and he/she wants to file it in a specific folder, for future easy access or for limiting the size of an ever growing in-basket folder, he/she is prompted for specifying which folder where to file the received mail.
In these two scenarios, the user is always prompted for specifying a folder where to file a mail. With the conventional mail systems, there exist different means to assist the user in the mail folder selection, as outlined below.
Simple mail systems propose a default folder which is always the same. The limitation of such systems is clearly that the classification is a very basic one and that there is no real help provided to the user.
Other frequent systems propose the folder which was selected during the most recent operation. This approach is only relevant for situations where a user treats a sequence of mails that relate to the same subject, hence worth being filed in the same folder. Again, the help provided to the user remains very limited.
More sophisticated mail systems use filtering techniques which were originally introduced to face the explosion of spamming. Such techniques, as for instance the one implemented in the “Mailbox Filter” product of Triumvirate Technologies Inc., rely on the address of the sender or on the mail subject in order to identify the most relevant folder(s) where to file a mail. This brings much further value than the previous listed systems, but presents nevertheless important limitations, as outlined below:    A filtering criteria based on the sender address asks for an important rule management for taking into account any unknown address;    A filtering criteria based on the sender address is not well suited for a mail user who communicates with a limited number of peers or either has a great majority of his/her mails exchanged with a limited numbers of peers;    A filtering criteria based on the mail subject is sensitive to typos; and    A filtering criteria based on the mail subject is language specific.
Thus, there is a need not answered by the existing mail systems to provide a solution to assist a user in the selection of a folder location where to store a mail.
The proposed invention aims to address this need with a method and system which relies on the potential relationships existing between exchanged mails. As it will be further described, the mail message header includes information on the sender plus information related to the exchanged mails that offers support for linking a mail to a specific storage location.